heroatheartfandomcom-20200214-history
INTRODUCTION
The Hero at Heart game system was created to allow a community to add and expand the game as they wished and then share that with other players and GM's. Feel free to add your own campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, special abilities, skills, characteristics, creatures, equipment, etc., along with your favorite characters and stories, and even tweak the rules of the whole system (with community agreement, of course) to make the game experience better for everyone involved! History I came up with the ESPER system because I've always loved role playing games and found that there weren't very many realistic horror games out there. I wanted a game where players could genuinely feel scared as they encountered supernatural forces, but also a game where players could feel like they were in a movie playing heroic characters that would face that evil and shove a beacon of light down its shadowy throat. I envisioned a game where, instead of players saying "I hit it with my sword," they could say something like "I run past it and tumble by, slashing at its legs with my sword as I pass" and have the GM be able to resolve this without spending an hour researching wether or not it was even possible by the rules of their system. So, ESPER was born, and I playtested it in groups that, as I had hoped, felt genuine fear at some parts, and genuinely like badasses at others. Everyone who ever playtested the system gave up their favorite systems and started using ESPER rules, but many of them wanted a fantasy setting to play in. Thus, the Days of Old was born. I also made the Star Captain setting before I realized that it might be best to make one unified system with campaign settings under it, each with their own unique rules while being played under the main system of rules. Out of this, I started working on the Hero at Heart system, but I realized that, as much as people were enjoying my game, I had never made a cent from it. I started to wonder if I even could: I had already given it away for free so many times, and I'm certainly no businessman. Then I thought about why I had created the system in the first place... ...I love telling stories, and I love sharing them. One of my original dreams, back in the days before MMO's were popular, was to come up with a video game RPG where one player took a set of predefined set pieces and dropped them into a world where the other players were playing heroes attempting to solve that player's adventure. I wanted to do a fantasy version and a mystery version, where the "GM" player would take premade NPC's and settings and props and put them together in a mystery for the players to solve, either competitively or as a team. Another early dream of mine was to write a series of fantasy books in a setting which was free for other writers to use and build on my plots and mythology. I realized when I thought about this that what I really wanted was to have people play in my world, and enjoy it, and build on it, and to do so and charge money would limit the number of people who would be able to do so. Thus, I began work transferring all my work to this wiki, where I could open it up to a community who could feel like a part of my universe, or could use it to build their own. Here is that completed vision. I hope anyone who finds it will come to enjoy it and feel as much a part of it as I have.